Upload or download a process template

NOTE

Feature availability: You work with process templates primarily when you connect to an on-premises Team Foundation Server (TFS). To customize a team project hosted on Team Services, see Manage process. However, you can use the Process Template Manager to export process templates from Team Services. Customizing a process through the user interface is only available from Team Services. If you want to customize a team project hosted on an on-premises TFS, see Customize your work tracking experience.

You can upload, download, and delete process templates for a team project collection. Also, you can mark a template to appear as the default when you add team projects. For a comparison of the default process templates -- Agile, CMMI, and Scrum -- see Choose a process.

TIP

To access the latest versions of the default processes/process templates:

For Team Services: Open the Process page from the account settings admin context, and choose the Export option from the actions menu of a default process. To learn more, see Manage processes.

You can access the latest versions of the default process templates installed on TFS 2017 here: %programfiles%/Microsoft Team Foundation Server 15.0/Tools/Deploy/ProcessTemplateManagerFiles/1033 (for TFS 2015, the main folder is Microsoft Team Foundation Server 14.0). For descriptions of each file and folder, see Overview of process template files.

To manage a process template

Open the same version of Visual Studio or Visual Studio Community as the on-premises TFS that you connect to. For example, if you connect to a TFS 2015 instance, you must connect from Visual Studio 2015 or Visual Studio Community 2015.

To cause the selected process template to appear as the default selection in the New Team Project Wizard.

Delete

To permanently remove the selected process template from the collection.

Process template correlation with an existing team project

To determine the type of process template that was used to create your team project, review the work item types that appear in the New Work Item menu for Team Explorer and then compare them with the work item types in the following chart. If your work item types differ from those shown listed, then a custom process template might have been used.

Scrum

Agile

CMMI

Process template restrictions and validation checks

Uploading a process template requires that it pass the following validation checks:

Process template total size should be 2 GB or less, or project creation will fail.

The upload process performs a partial verification check to make sure that the XML of each process template XML file is valid. If you receive any errors when you try to upload the process template, review the XML to determine the cause of the error. Note that duplicate tags in an XML file can cause errors. If there is no error in the XML, check to make sure all the appropriate files are included in your process template in the correct folder locations.

Important: The schema definition for process templates uses a mix of camel-case and all capitalized elements. If you encounter errors when validating your type definition files, check the case structure of your elements. Also, the case structure of opening and closing tags must match according to the rules for XML syntax. See Process template plug-ins: Index to XML element definitions.

Related notes

Periodically, updates are made to the process templates to support new features which have been cataloged here.

Update a process template to enable new features

Add another team project

You can add a team project using the New Team Project Wizard. The New Team Project Wizard runs the set of instructions contained within the process template files to configure initial settings and upload artifacts and template files.